George Selwyn English (16/09/1912 - 08/10/1980), an Australian composer. English worked as a critic for Sydney newspapers and subsequently as chief editor for the music publishers, W. H. Paling & Co. Ltd, doing a great deal of freelance composing and arranging, especially for theatre, radio and films. He assembled an extensive collection of 'mood music' while associated with the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit and with the Shell and Vacuum oil companies' production units. His experiences during the filming of Alice through the Centre (1950) developed his craft as a composer and led to such works as The Australian Dingo (1958), Death of a Wombat (which won a Prix Italia in 1959) and The First Waratah (for narrator, wind quintet and percussion, 1972) which were imaginative evocations in music and text of aspects of the Australian bush.
He also wrote numerous songs, including Song for a Crowning (1953), to a poem by Elizabeth Riddell, and won an Australian Broadcasting Commission prize for the overture for full orchestra, For a Royal Occasion (1952). English was not prolific, but wrote reliably to order. His serious compositions included Sinfonia (1967), the overture, Botany Bay 1770 (1960), Quintet for Wind Instruments (1969), Chiaroscuro (1966) for string trio, and an undated Symphony in A minor. A technically skilled composer of limited imagination, he produced a tempered version of the English modernist style of the 1920s and 1930s. Only after Chiaroscuro did he show 'a cautious acceptance of the principles of serialism'.

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

Christina Rossetti (from Goblin Market and other Poems, published 1862)